In a Personal Reach Service, a calling party places a telephone call to a subscriber's PRS telephone number, which typically may be a call to an "800" number. If the PRS call is placed to an "800" number, a Network Control Point (NCP) translates the dialed 800 number into a conventional NPA+NXX+XXXX telephone number and routes the call to an adjunct connected to the network, which contains bridging and signaling units for providing this service. If not an 800 number call, but a conventional POTS call, the subscriber's call is directly connected to this adjunct. At a bridging and signaling unit at this adjunct, the identity of the subscriber with whom which the calling party wants to communicate is determined from the number dialed by the calling party, or through the inputting by the calling party of the subscriber's code or name via touch-tone inputs or using voice-recognition techniques. Using the subscriber's identity as a database locator, the identity of the subscriber's paging company and the Capcode that identifies that subscriber's pager is retrieved. A signal is then sent to the identified paging company to initiate the broadcast of a wireless page to the identified called subscriber's pager. The subscriber, upon receiving the page and wishing to talk to the calling party, places a revertive call to the adjunct. After the revertive call is associated with the subscriber at the adjunct through the entry by the subscriber of a touch-tone sequence, for example, the calling party's waiting call and the subscriber's revertive call are bridged together. With such a system, the subscriber can be reached wherever his or her pager is capable of receiving the paging company's signal and the subscriber is proximate to a telephone to be able to place the revertive telephone call.
Generally, upon receiving a signal from the network adjunct to initiate a page to an identified subscriber, the paging company launches a nationwide page. Since the subscriber is in only one place at any given time, the pages to the subscriber's pager broadcasted by the plurality of local transmitters across the nation, except for the page in the one area in which the subscriber is actually located, are a waste of resources. These "wasted" pages increase traffic and thus the paging interval at each of the local paging transmitters. The paging interval is that time difference between when a message packet is received by a paging transmitter and placed in a queue for transmission, and when that message packet is served from the queue and actually transmitted by the transmitter.